The Embodied State: Power, Health, and Policing in Practice

Introduction
Health burdens in policing remain widely discussed, yet research often narrows them to measurable stress indicators. Less attention has been given to how health is produced, embodied, and negotiated in the everyday enactment of state authority. This study examines these dynamics in routine policing, particularly in settings shaped by migration and border regimes, where officers’ bodily presence takes on heightened significance.

Goals and Methods
The ethnographic study investigates how institutional pressures, bureaucratic routines, and embodied practices shape health in police work, including contexts in which officers were continuously deployed in a refugee accommodation. Data were generated through participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and expert interviews. Analysis followed an iterative, grounded theory–informed approach using coding and memo writing. Access and reflexivity posed methodological challenges due to hierarchical authority structures. A collaborative practice (joint sketching of legal procedures with a police officer) served both as an additional mode of data generation and as a relational technique opening space for dialogue within an otherwise asymmetrical field setting.

Results
Findings reveal persistent tensions between organizational demands and officers’ lived role understandings. While bureaucratic procedures aim to document and standardize police work, many officers experience them as disconnected from their professional self-conceptions. In migration-related policing, these tensions intensify as officers navigate overlapping expectations of care, control, and security. Furthermore, the findings suggest that migration is not the primary source of strain but rather a context in which broader organizational contradictions become especially visible. Health strains emerge not merely as individual stress responses but as structural effects embedded in organizational hierarchies and power asymmetries.

Conclusions
The study shows how ethnographic and selectively collaborative approaches can address methodological challenges in researching power-laden institutions. By foregrounding embodiment and situated practice, it contributes to qualitative health research and methodological debates on positionality, vulnerability, and knowledge production in institutional settings.